Wednesday, January 1, 1997

Q&A Phillip Lopate: Dodging Beckett

Originally appeared in the Boston Book Review.

(Date approximate).

One Saturday morning when I was about ten years old, we were
all hounding him [his father] because he wouldn't take us anywhere; and this
time I joined in the assault. Suddenly he lashed out at me with rabid fury:
"You! You stay out of it, you're a cold fish." . . .

"Cold fish" is an awful judgment to hang on a
ten-year-old kid. But give him his due, he could have had a prescient insight:
I often think there is something cold and "fishy" about me. Or
perhaps he was really saying, "You're like me, detached,
unemotional." An inverted compliment.

So I became a writer.

"Portrait of My Body"

HB: Let me start
with the very last piece in "Portrait of My Body." You've just become
a father and describe the experience as "so shocking and strange; on the
other hand, so typical, so stupefyingly ordinary." That seems to me an
emblem for the personal essay as you practice it.

PL: I care about
daily life. The surrealists were always trying to find the miraculous in the
ordinary. I'm not looking for the miraculous but for the puzzling, the
intriguing, the spin on daily life. What is more common than birth? All of us
have been born. Yet there is something violent about it.

HB: I loved the
description in that essay of you and your wife's efforts to conceive: "At
first we were frisky, reveling in it like newlyweds. Later it became another
chore to perform, like moving the car for alternate-side-of-the-street parking
. . . "

I enjoyed the
book, though it took a while for me to trust that all this attention to daily
life would not turn out to be narcissistic or trivial.

PL: I'm
essentially a storyteller, I wouldn't embark on something if I didn't think
there was going to be aesthetic pay off. I only use what I think I can get some
kind of irony out of or amusement. Humor is very important, irony and wryness.

HB: You're a
novelist, and have published collections of poetry. At what point did you make
your commitment to the personal essay?

PL: I realize,
looking back, that I was always attracted to the voice of the personal essay,
even when it showed up in poetry and fiction. I was drawn to Fielding's essays,
to Balzac's mini-essays, and to Dostoevsky's digressive Underground Man -- to
the sound of somebody expatiating.

I love the sound of analysis. I've always liked to read
Freud, for instance. It doesn't matter if I agree or disagree; he's one of the
great prose writers. The sound of analysis is very close to me, and of
rationalization. It raises issues of the unreliable narrator. I was always
drawn to unreliable narrator fiction whether it was Ford Maddox Ford's
"The Good Soldier" or Gide's "The Immoralist" or even
Celine.

I value the act of judgment that a reader has to engage in,
and the question, at every moment, of whether to go along with the writer or
not. It is dialogue with the writer, rather than just agreement, that I find
stimulating. I'm not looking for total merger.

HB: In your
introduction to "The Art of the Personal Essay: an Anthology from the
Classical Era to the Present," you suggest that the novel itself may have
arisen from the unreliable narrator of the personal essay. How so?

PL: In the
eighteenth century you find both forms, the novel and the essay, exploding.
Addison and Steele, Samuel Johnson, Swift -- all of them were writing in a
mocking, or rather a self-mocking narrative voice. Defoe, too, was a crossover.
If you read Addison and Steele, for instance, you find more fictive elements in
than you would expect in an essay. They employ scenes, false narrators, and the
like.

HB: But that's
not true of your work. You are always in contention with yourself. There's
imagination, but not a lot of fantasy.

PL: I agree, I'm
not much of a fantasist. For me, imagination is something that develops out of
observation and reality. Though I wrote "The Rug Merchant," a made-up
story with made-up characters, it's easier for me to write about myself. I do
think that many of the transparent personae that Lamb or Addison and Steele
used were ways of speaking for themselves through lively fictive narrators.
That freedom encouraged me.

HB: In the
introduction to "The Art of the Personal Essay," you talk about the
construction of a persona. I sense a paradox here. The personal essay has
confessional connotations but the persona you talk about needing is a mask, a
fictive self.

PL: Is it a
fictional or a partial self? One becomes a personal essayist because one feels
that one can never come to the end of oneself, to the end of confusion and
contradiction. You're never telling the whole truth. When I write, it's not
that I'm lying but I'm selecting out so much.

HB: And it was
Freudianism that gave you the initial push toward the pleasures of
self-analysis.

PL: In the
fifties, in Brooklyn, it was Freud and Dostoevsky, Kafka and stickball. My
mother used to see a therapist in the Bronx.

HB: From Brooklyn
to the Bronx for a therapist?

PL: Yes, and
she'd come back and tell us Dr. Jonas said this, Dr. Jonas said that. The sense
that there was an authority out there, the shrink, the analyst, intrigued me.
It was another figure in my childhood, like the writer, who understood.

HB: Your writing
has patience. It's not rushed, not out to dazzle or knock the reader out with
just once punch. It's out to take someone along. And it's not about fragments
or discontinuities. There's a sense of the self's intactness. So you don't get
to claim the cachet of the postmodern; anything but.

PL: In
"Portrait of My Body" I make explicit comments about my distance from
the self-congratulations of modernism. I draw my main strength from Montaigne,
who you can see either as a proto-modernist or just as a guy writing in the
sixteenth century. I don't feel obliged to connect myself to the adventure of
modernism. I certainly don't feel sympathetic to a kind of moldy
anti-modernism. We can take a pluralistic attitude. We don't have to salute the
modernist flag.

Coming of age as a writer, I was drawn to patient voices
like Fielding, for instance, who were not discontinuous. And the greatness of
Montaigne is that he seemed to have an intact self even as he says that man is
a continuously changeable animal. That's the rock that I want to build my work
on.

HB: You write
about Beckett spelling the ruin of many an aspiring writer. Beckett loomed so
large in the sixties. How did you manage to escape him?

PL: I did an end
run around him. I decided not to be involved with him at all. As long as there
was a Machado de Assis, an Italo Svevo, as long as there was mischief afoot in
the world, and a sense of plenitude and vitality, that interested me a great
deal more than the ruins.

I wasn't any good at ruins. When I tried to write bleak
Ashberry-like poems for instance, things that had the taste of ashes, I
couldn't do it.

HB: Do you think
of Ashberry as bleak? I think of him as coming as close to creating
compute-generated poetry as a non-computer can. He beat the computer to it.

PL: In Ashberry,
things can't be allowed to add up. When he reads poetry, he looks at the poem
as if to say, what have we here? Where does this piece of paper come from?
There's a slight snarl on his face. In a way, he doesn't even own the poem. In
that sense, it is as if computer generated.

He was the major poet the same way Beckett was the major
prose writer. I was a parvenu, a kid from the slums happy to be invited to the
party at all. I wanted to be let in, so how could I feel the world was coming
to an end? I've always been anti-apocalyptic in sensibility, maybe because I
want to have a chance to be middle class. And I don't like the bullying tone of
apocalypse. In my essay, "Resistance to the Holocaust," I talk about
the Holocaust as a rhetorical bully, and I think of apocalypse as a bully.
There's no argument. Everything goes up in flames, and humor goes out the
window. I'm a skeptical not an apocalyptic thinker.

HB: Why did you
leave poetry behind?

PL: I found I
could do everything in the essay that I was doing in poetry. Plus, I had
written two books of poetry and was actually known as a poet, but had never
trained as one. I kept coming up against this guild mentality that you had to
be passionately concerned with sound in poetry, with music, syllabification,
meter -- Marianne Moore did it this way, Pound the other way. You had to care
about measure, the variable foot, all these issues poets were debating and I
never cared about very much.

I was working intuitively with sound but didn't feel the
visionary zeal that many poets do, that poetry's a special thing. I didn't like
that pain-in-the-ass pathetic quality of the poet.

HB: It seems,
ultimately, you have more allegiance to the prose in life.

PL: I loved the
Portuguese poet, Passado, and Pavese -- poets who had a prosaic quality.
Late Randall Jarrell had that quality, Frank O'hara had it. I liked prosy
poets, so why not just go into prose? I liked Niconar Parra, who wrote
anti-poems. But if you're drawn to the anti-poem, you're asking for trouble
because the people with credentials are going to say you don't belong. When I
went to Houston to teach and had already published a book of poetry, they told
me you can't teach a poetry workshop; we have poets. I said OK, I'm not going
to get into this guild. And once I started writing essays, everybody responded
as though this were my form.

I developed a voice. I became an essayist. And then I fell
in love with the tradition.

HB: You tend to
identify the speculative, floating, flaneuristic consciousness of the essay
writer with bachelorhood.

PL: With
bachelorhood and with the city. It's a lot easier to develop a detached
persona, as did Addison and Steele, Samuel Johnson, Lamb and Hazlitt, if you're
not married.

But bachelorhood is, in part, a pose. I didn't take it
totally seriously. Even when I took it on, I'd already been married once. It
interested me as an avenue of literary expression. I like this idea that you
take a position but then you think, what if I'm wrong? You think against
yourself. I have reason to be skeptical toward myself; I've been wrong a lot.
Especially on issues of compassion and solipsism, if you examine yourself you may
find you have a hard time putting yourself in somebody else's shoes.

HB: And the
personal essay is a way of finding out what shoes you're already in?

PL: Definitely.
It's a way of exploring the borders of the self, because you can forgive
yourself if you get to know yourself. When I spoke about the stench of myself,
I was aware there are certain things that would be irritating to loved ones.
It's a little progress one makes in these areas, even after you've located
them. There's a stubbornness. I'm not sure I can really change that much but I
can at least report what it's like to come up against what I call the
catastrophe of one's personality.

HB: You seem to
need to dodge whatever is set and predicable about yourself, including,
finally, bachelorhood.

PL: Certainly
having a child has been a revolutionary experience in my life. There's so much
responsibility you can't walk away from, so many times when you can't be
selfish.

HB: So much for
flaneurism

PL: Exactly. I
can't be a flaneur anymore. I took it as far as it would go. I got married and
had a child partly because I sensed I wasn't getting the same kicks out of
flaneurism that I once had. I was having to goose myself into appreciating the
street.

I don't want to go stale. I don't think I'll write another
collection of personal essays anytime soon. This last collection, for better
for worse, cleared the decks.

HB: You have not
only practiced but proselytized for this form of investigation.

PL: I don't think
it's understood that well. To give you an example, Joan Didion's last book of
essays attracted very little attention, whereas her recent novel got major
reviews. Well, she happens to be a better essayist than a novelist.

HB: You're
critical of essayists who attract readers with the lure of knowledge -- writers
like Stephen Jay Gould and Oliver Sacks. But what's wrong with people's wanting
to learn?

PL: I think it's
great that they do. I've always told my students you have to deliver world, not
just your feelings. You have to do research. There's a lot of research in my
pieces, about literature, urbanism, the movies. But what I have always backed
away from is the explainer -- what Gertrude Stein calls the village explainer
-- who becomes a kind of everyman and loses his or her idiosyncrasy. To be honest
about it, I've never gotten much from Lewis Thomas. He's a good explainer but
doesn't interest me as a man. He doesn't dramatize his contradictions. I would
rather read Loren Eisely, who was neurotic. I'm looking for texture or taste.

HB: And Oliver
Sacks?

PL: He's a
genuine original. Sometimes his pieces make me uncomfortable because he raises
certain issues of personality and then refuses to deal with them, but he always
makes you think he is singular. For better or worse, he's not trying to be
everyman.

HB: Let's talk
about your essay, "Resistance to the Holocaust." Speaking as a Jew,
you say, "I must be lacking in tribal feeling. When it comes to mass
murder, I can see no difference between their casualties and ours." But
when writing about your father in "Portrait of My Body," you accuse
him of being unable to relate personally to the Holocaust; you're upset that he
lacks the very feelings you disown.

PL: After having
written "Resistance to the Holocaust," it occurred to me I could have
written the exact opposite essay. I had enough feelings that go the other way.
I purposely put in that piece about my father because I wanted people to
realize that there was a contradiction. You spotted it.

HB: You're not
alone, as you know, in your feelings about the Holocaust. Jerzy Kosinski, near
the end of his life, took a similar stance against what he thought of as the
Cult of the Holocaust.

PL: Kosinski was
excited by the essay. A few days before he took his life, he talked to me about
it. I must say, I had no idea he was going to kill himself. He didn't look like
a man who was close to suicide.

"Resistance to the Holocaust" argues there's a lot
more to Judaism than the Holocaust. It's a very theologically and
intellectually rich religion, and I don't want to let that all go.

HB: Most of your
essays poke at the nerve of your Jewishness. When writing about movies, for
instance, you say you only allowed yourself feel spiritual transcendence in the
movie theater. Outside, the Talmudic style of skeptical questioning took over.
You write that the spiritual appeal of a Bresson or Mizoguchi "came into
conflict with a competing spiritual claim, indefinitely put off but never quite
abandoned: to become a good Jew sometime before I die."

What do you mean by a good Jew?

PL: Somebody who
is observant without necessarily believing in God.

HB: So a bad Jew
is someone who is observant and
believes in God?

PL: I'm being
provocative on this issue because I'm perversely the only one in my family
involved in Judaism. Everybody else became a devout atheist. So I became the
family skeptic .

HB: You approach
these issues obliquely. There's no essay that focuses on them, and no essay
from which it's absent.

PL: Yes. I think
of myself as a Jewish writer and an American writer. Every essay has something
of both.

HB: Would it be
correct to say there's been a kind of mellowing in your work?

PL: There's the
mellowing that comes with middle age. I think of "Bachelorhood" as
not particularly angry; the bachelor both engages with the world and remains
detached. "Against Joie de Vivre" deals with anger, grief, with
everything that is irreconcilable. "Portrait of My Body" is a
mellowing; there's more acceptance in it, and more obligation toward wisdom. We
don't have that many years to become wise. And we have an obligation not to
become bitter, to observe but not to become bitter.

HB: What I
probably enjoyed most about the book is the pace, the lack of haste, the
obvious pleasure in the writing, which makes a point all of its own to the
reader.

PL: Opportunities
for wit will come. You don't have to pump it up all the time. I feel I'm
writing against a style, the prevailing poetic style that's hushed, that aims
at a feeling of white space and wonder through minimalist effects. I think
people are being trained in schools to work with sensuous concrete imagery, and
to move from image to image like an archipelago. They try to get all their
meaning to come from images. Just as I'm not a particularly fantasizing writer,
I'm also not a particularly metaphorical writer. What attracts me is the sound
of a mind trying to puzzle things out. That sense of thinking is absent from a
lot of American writing now.

I don't feel a need to construct rhapsody. My task now is to
glue together my essayistic and my fictive voice so that I can write a book
that has some of the trustworthy fullness of the essay but is a novel.